If, in the future, Python used a library such as MPFR and made all floats a given precision (say, by giving a flag to the interpreter "python -prec2048"), it would never be enough to make infinity because it only has the limitation of a 64 bit exponent.
This is just an example of course, probably won't happen, but when I read "1e1000" or such a number it doesn't strike me as infinite (although a particular version of IEEE floating point may consider it that), it strikes me as a lazy programmer who thinks it's bigger than any other number he's processing. I've added this case to my PEP .rst file and why it's not a good solution Thanks, Cade On Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 8:25 AM Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen...@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote: > Guido van Rossum writes: > > > I don't actually understand why Stephen made this claim about > > arithmetic operations, > > Stephen is often mistaken about computers (among many topics). That's > why he mostly posts on -ideas, and mostly throws drafts away rather > than post them. :-) > > I would not claim that evaluating a literal such as 1e1000 is not an > arithmetic operation, I just "forgot" that these examples exist > (mostly in a context of trying to get NaN with math.asin(2) and got > ValueError instead ;-/ ). > > I still stand by the argument that since some common ways of producing > true infinities (rather than overflows) and NaNs such as 1.0/0.0 and > 0.0/0.0 end up as Exceptions rather than float values, inf and nan > have rather small usefulness in Python with only builtins, especially > nan. "from math import inf" has to be the least annoying thing about > working with infinities and overflows in Python (which, to be fair, is > quite annoying in any context, on computers or on paper). > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org > To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ > Message archived at > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/22TKQDJV4PNMOK5KUAX74QHX3KP74XCT/ > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >
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